"Until the case is solved." She held up a hand before I could protest. "Think about it. We publish now, we tip off every corrupt official in that network. They lawyer up, they destroy evidence, they circle the wagons. The FBI loses their shot at federal charges and those are the charges that actually stick. Your arsonist either goes to ground or accelerates their timeline, and someone ends up dead."
She was right. I hated that she was right.
"We wait until the feds have enough to make arrests," Marianne continued. "Until you and Stone have identified the arsonist. Then we publish, and we publish everything. The corruption, the cover-up, the vigilante burning it all down. The whole story, start to finish."
"And if someone else breaks it first?"
"They won't have what you have." She tapped the folder. "No one else has years of documentation from inside FDNY. No one else has a federal pipeline feeding them financial records. You've built something here, Harper. Don't blow it by rushing to print."
I exhaled. Nodded. "Okay. We wait."
"Keep working. Keep documenting. The moment this thing breaks open, I want us ready to go." She slid the folder back across the desk.
I nodded, gathered the folder, and stood.
"Harper."
I paused at the door.
"Good work," Marianne said. "Really."
Coming from her, that meant something. Marianne didn't hand out compliments like party favors. In five years of working under her, I could count on one hand the number of times she'd said those words.
"Thanks," I said. "I'll keep you posted."
I walked back through the newsroom, past the cluttered desks and the hum of keyboards and the low murmur of phone calls.
The folder felt heavier in my hands than it should have. Weeks of work. Years of Garrett's documentation. A case that was finally coming together.
Now I just needed to find the person lighting the matches.
Later that night, I was back at Garrett's apartment.
Diaz had called while I was leaving the Times office. She was impressed with the direction we'd pointed her, cross-referencing the arson targets with victims of fires in buildings owned by the shell company network.
But the list was long. Dozens of names spanning years of negligence. People who'd been injured, displaced, traumatized. People who'd lost family members to fires that never should have happened.
Any one of them could have a motive.
"We need to narrow it down," I said, spreading the victim list across Garrett's coffee table. "Diaz has her team running the arson investigation, and Keene's handling the financial traces. But the more we can give them, the faster this moves."
Garrett nodded, pulling his laptop closer. "The arsonist knows the buildings intimately. Knows which ones to target, when to hit them, and how to control the burn. That's not just research—that's personal."
"So we look for someone who lost more than property. Someone who lost a person." I scanned the names. "Fatal fires. That's where we start."
We worked in silence for a while, sorting through incident reports and news articles, building a shorter list of the dead.
A man in his sixties who'd died of smoke inhalation in a Greenpoint building. A young mother and her infant in Bushwick—faulty wiring, no working smoke detectors. A teenager in East New York who'd been trapped when a fire escape collapsed.
The stories blurred together after a while. So much loss. So much preventable tragedy.
I was cross-referencing the third name on our list when I noticed Garrett had gone quiet.
Not working-quiet. Something else.
He was staring at his laptop screen, his jaw tight, his shoulders rigid with something I couldn't name.
"Garrett?" I set down my pen. "What is it?"
